First, black people of all class backgrounds face racism. (But you know that, right? Because I'm just not interested in having that argument.)

I'm not doubting that. However, I'm not sure AA is exclusively about racism. If it were, Asians would still be entitled to it.

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Second, she said her family was not always rich. Do all people who aren't rich make their children work 40 hours a week, in contravention of our labor laws and human rights obligations? She doesn't need to have worked 40 hours a week to have experienced poverty or working poverty or lower-middle-classdom or middle-classdom or whatever, right? Your question seems bizarre to me.

I think you're misunderstanding my point: I'm not saying that she wouldn't have felt the impact of being poor. My point is about how her word choice reflects perceptions.

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Also, we all know that the accepted rationale for affirmative action in law school admissions is the diversity of the profession and not remedying disadvantage. So really, why does this matter at all?

Who's defining "accepted rationale"? I don't follow AA debates in the media as closely as I do other issues, but I've frequently seen it justified by AA supporters as being necessary to remedying disadvantage. I've also frequently seen the idea that it's necessary to produce lawyers who are sensitive to people coming from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Sorry for the extremely long post above. Much more briefly:

No, racism is not the exclusive basis for affirmative action. But to the extent that it affects people's educational opportunities, I think it is a reasonable basis for affirmative action. That's all I meant.

By "accepted rationale," I meant the one accepted by the Supreme Court in Grutter. That decision allowed race-based affirmative action in public law school admissions in order to ensure the diversity of the profession. It did not allow schools to use lower scores as a remedy for past disadvantage (or at least it did not allow them to consider race itself as an index of past disadvantage).

I think present-day disadvantage, past disadvantage, and the diversity of the profession should be considerations in admission, FWIW.

Torres has made the big plays, yeah, but without Pronger, the Joe Cheechoo Train would've eaten us alive already. We were lucky to even be close in the first two games.

You're right, though. I was thinking of Ehrhoff.

That second period pissed me off so much. After such an amazing first period, I thought the wheels were coming off. You guys were lucky to get away 1-0 after the first (thanks to Toskala), and then to go up 2-1 thanks to some clinical finishing and terrible defensive lapses by Spacek and (IIRC, and very surprisingly) Jason Smith was a little bit too much to stomach.

The Oilers will need to figure out a way to solve Toskala if they want to win this series. They're manning up on Thornton and Cheechoo beautifully, and they definitely exploited your young defensemen with their speed down the wing, but it doesn't help if you put more than 90 shots near the net (what a CRAZY statistic!) and you only score three times. Give the Joe Cheechoo Train one good game and it's lights out, in that case.

That's my point. They've been bottled up well so far, and that's mainly thanks to an aggressive back-check and some fantastic defense. Last night's goal was a bit of a fluke. However, they're bound to click at least once this series, and if Edmonton can't muster some goals when it happens, they're going to get burnt, and BADLY.

And, really, Roly doesn't deserve that sort of bull after his fish-out-of-the-water heroics over the last nine games. Man, that guy looks clumsy, but does he ever get the job done.

This is where we fundamentally differ. I think that schools should take the most qualified applicants, based mostly on numbers and to some degree interesting life experiences (note: being a URM does not, in itself, qualify as an interesting life experience). If this means that the whole class is comprised of Long Island Jews and Asians, so be it.

I don't think law schools have clearly thought about what they actually want, making the numbers they rely on pretty silly.

This mini-thread has gotten out of hand, so I'm paring down the quoting to just answer something that I think is at the heart of it. Forgive me if I've taken out too much, and let me know if you think I've missed something important.

This is the part I wonder about. I've noticed that undergrad and law schools tend to be very intellectually lazy in the admissions process, at least compared to the graduate admissions programs I'm familiar with. Even though what I'm about to say is anecdotal, I've seen that laziness reflected in the makeup of the student bodies. In all my time in and around Penn and Princeton, I only met two minority from a truly poor background, and they both attended good private schools thanks to parental tuition benefits. While the minorities were less affluent than whites, I couldn't find anyone from Strawberry Mansion.

Now, I know it makes sense to hide your background at these schools, but I'm good at spotting the little things. (Sadly, not House or Veronica Mars level, but "you speak in the passive voice a lot; are you from Kiev?" good.)

I completely agree that admissions committees are intellectually lazy. I think it might be in part because, unlike elite liberal arts graduate programs, the study of law doesn't require any particular set of skills or interests, or a specific type of preparation, and thus you get a huge number of people applying with very few weeding characteristics and little in common with one another. In combination with the size of most law school classes, that helps me understand why law schools end up relying on silly things like index numbers and the pedigree of certain undergraduate institutions, and much less on writing samples and recommendations and interviews and such.

That said, I just don't believe that the use of race in admissions is a particularly egregious form of this laziness. Yes, I think it would be really great if more lower-class URM students went to law school, and I think this would happen if there were greater attention to the challenges individual applicants face -- even without a specific program of socioeconomic AA. But I don't see URM admissions as a fixed quantity so that upper- and middle-class URM students have to be excused to make room for their poor and working class brothers and sisters. Do you? Can't we have more rich Latinos, middle-class African Americans, and poor Native Americans at the same time?

You know, I have a fairly rigid socialist training, and I was loath to admit it for a long time, but race really does matter. African American and Native American and Latino and Hmong (etc.) communities need lawyers to represent them, lawyers who reflect them and who understand the specific dynamics of their racial experiences. I work with many lawyers who represent a racial group that is different than their own, and I think that's great. But I've also noticed how, occasionally, these lawyers don't "get" things, how sometimes folks just want to talk to someone who understands better, who looks like them, who speaks a bit of Kreyol, whatever. I think that's fair.

I also know that even upper-income African American and Latino families face huge disadvantages in life compared to their white counterparts: fewer assets, worse schools, diminshed expectations from teachers, worse healthcare, bad encounters with cops, etc., etc. I think it's right that AA should account for these qualities in addition to family income, and race itself is an imperfect but fairly reliable index.

You know, I have a fairly rigid socialist training, and I was loath to admit it for a long time, but race really does matter. African American and Native American and Latino and Hmong (etc.) communities need lawyers to represent them, lawyers who reflect them and who understand the specific dynamics of their racial experiences. I work with many lawyers who represent a racial group that is different than their own, and I think that's great. But I've also noticed how, occasionally, these lawyers don't "get" things, how sometimes folks just want to talk to someone who understands better, who looks like them, who speaks a bit of Kreyol, whatever. I think that's fair.

But on the other hand, you probably think that it is racist to only want to marry/date people of your own race, or to only work with such people. Isn't your position inconsistent?

Huh? I don't see how either of those sentiments has anything to do with what I wrote. But taking them one by one:

No, I think it's just fine, in general, for people to want to date within their own race (though I do not). I do sometimes wonder how narrow into ethnic breakdowns and such one really has to get for this to make sense.

And, while I'm not sure I'd say racist point-blank, I don't think it's okay for people to want to work with only people of their own race. It's near impossible in this modern world, and not at all the same thing as dating and marrying.

But on the other hand, you probably think that it is racist to only want to marry/date people of your own race, or to only work with such people. Isn't your position inconsistent?

There's a significant difference between wanting to work with only your own race and actively pursuing a single-race workplace. The former is usually motivated by laziness and ignorance while the latter is usually motivated by hatred.

As for only wanting to date your own race, so what? I would hardly delude myself into thinking I'm putting down an entire race of people by choosing not to date them.

But on the other hand, you probably think that it is racist to only want to marry/date people of your own race, or to only work with such people. Isn't your position inconsistent?

There's a significant difference between wanting to work with only your own race and actively pursuing a single-race workplace. The former is usually motivated by laziness and ignorance while the latter is usually motivated by hatred.

As for only wanting to date your own race, so what? I would hardly delude myself into thinking I'm putting down an entire race of people by choosing not to date them.

A much better response than my benedryl-addled muddle. Thank you.

My response made sense? Sweet.

I thought my tequila filled bloodstream would have made my response less than coherent.